This post is following a discussion with a new client on her recent visit to a museum in London, she explained at the entrance the signs were large and brief, and she was able to ventured further, deeper into the individual categories of the museum where she found the level of information more detailed, you know the dusty cabinet of fossils, and antiquities.

Let visitors navigate where they want to go, without confusing them
Very detailed level of information from the start of an experience, is too much for most users, in this example, she may have not have successfully navigated deeper into the museum archives. And the museum would have failed to entice visitors to the various areas of the museum,

It’s all about seeing how far you can get, without being too bombarded by information.

This is the same as website navigation, when you visit your next site, think about the messages you see on the page, is it clear? do you understand what it means? where will you go if you click on the button or text link?

The methods that are used signpost a web-site will affect the number of areas visitors view per visit, and the length of time they spend on each page. If they are frustrated by not knowing what page there are on, or if they cannot find the correct information they will exit the site and may not even come back.

The maps below shows how a museum is organised, the rooms, the levels, can visitors understand this map to have a relaxing, enjoyable experience?

Meeting the mental model of your users

Every visitor who comes to a web site, will have built up a mental model of how the site is organised. If the site structure or ‘information architecture’ does not meet their mental model then this leads to negative, confused feelings which ‘turns off’ the user. By testing web sites early, you can easily measure how successful you have met the needs and requirements of your users.

There has to be something very interesting on a site for someone to read an entire article or story about a subject. Normally you will have lost people by the second or third paragraph, but that’s another subject – copywriting.

The process of user centered design and creating useful websites, should start at an early stage in a web site project. In this post we wanted to share with you our process for visualising and designing the most useful and usable websites.

Before we start any sexy, fancy design, what we want to consider is “is the structure and layout of the web interface easy to understand?”, “does it follow how users think it works in their minds?” This way of working allows us to understand our users “mental models” in their minds, in relation to how the site should be physically structured.

By learning and using this feedback in the web design, we can add to the value of the user experience on a web site, and turn this into an enjoyable experience for our users.

We’ve had an example published on the wireframes website which summarises how we used interactive prototypes worked on a recent project with East Hampshire District Council.

Using interactive prototypes allowed us to confirm the areas of the site that were successful in terms of users being able to achieve the tasks (we were asking them in a user testing interview) successfully and quickly.

More about the way we worked is on the article. We hope you find it interesting.

Image of the interactive prototypes for easthampshire.org